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DID YOU KNOW?
The Army
Spent
It Can’t
Explain
TALK:
5am
7am – 2pm
MUSIC:
2pm – 5am
RADIO IS YOURS
14
Willamette Week OCTOBER 11, 2017 wweek.com

In 1996, Congress passed legislation requiring all
federal agencies to undergo annual audits, but a
July 2016 report by the U.S. Defense Department’s
inspector general found that the Army alone has accumulated
$6.5 trillion in expenditures that can’t be accounted for over
the past two decades.
As Dave Lindorff reported for the news website This Can’t
Be Happening!, the DOD “has not been tracking or recording
or auditing all of the taxpayer money allocated by Congress—
what it was spent on, how well it was spent, or where the
money actually ended up.” But the Army wasn’t alone. “Things
aren’t any better at the Navy, Air Force and Marines,” he
added.
The report appeared at a time when “politicians of both
major political parties are demanding accountability for every
penny spent on welfare.…Ditto for people receiving unemploy-
ment compensation,” Lindorff wrote. Politicians have also
engaged in pervasive efforts “to make teachers accountable for
student ‘performance,’” he added. Yet, he observed, “the mili-
tary doesn’t have to account for any of its trillions of dollars of
spending…even though Congress fully a generation ago passed
a law requiring such accountability.”
In March 2017, after Trump proposed a $52 billion
increase in military spending, Thomas Hedges reported for
The Guardian that “the Pentagon has exempted itself with-
out consequence for 20 years now, telling the Government
Accountability Office that collecting and organizing the
required information for a full audit is too costly and time-
consuming.”
The most recent DOD audit deadline was September 2017,
yet the Pentagon, Congress and the media don’t seem to have
paid any attention.